Executive Summary
Chas Holloway joined us this week with a presentation called Freedom Defined — the revisited edition of his Free World Theory — and he opens it with a sentence that stops the room: there are more people living in slavery today than at any time in human history, even right here in America.
Most of us want to argue with that immediately. America is the land of the free. That is what we were taught, and that is what we believe. Chas does not argue with the belief. He asks a question underneath it instead. What is freedom?
Try to answer it in one sentence. Does freedom mean your rent and your food are provided for you? Does it mean you do not have to fear government intrusion into your life? Does it mean you live in security? Does it mean you have the power to do anything you want? Those are four different societies, and they cannot all be the same word.
His answer is that nobody knows — because the word freedom has never been scientifically defined in politics. Then he runs the identical test on the word crime and gets the identical result. Is it a crime to take someone's money? What if the IRS takes it out of your account? Is it a crime to earn money? What if you earn as much as Google or Exxon or Elon Musk? Is it a crime to order a beer — and what about during Prohibition?
From that undefined foundation, Chas builds the rest: why social science never matured, why our leaders resemble medieval monks handed the controls at NASA, the only two ways property can change hands, the four cases that expose what stealing actually is, and why four and a half thousand years of throwing out tyrants has produced exactly zero freedom. It is logical, it is sourced, and it ends somewhere hopeful.
Scroll to the bottom for Key Takeaways.
Freedom Undefined: The Meter Problem in Modern Politics
Chas frames the failure the way a scientist would.
Imagine physics with no agreed definition of the word meter — the world's leading physicists arguing all day, every day. A meter is from here to the end of the room. No, from here to the center of the city. No, to the center of the sun. No, you need a microscope to see one.
If that were the state of physics, there would be no physics. No bridges, no satellites, no rockets landing upright on their tails.
That is exactly the state of our politics. We have people running entire nations who cannot define the words they govern by — speaking with enormous certainty about freedom and crime and justice and morality without a clue as to what those words mean. And Chas is careful to say this is not one party's disease. It runs across the aisle and straight through the world council bureaucrats. Anyone who makes a career out of authority.
He takes the same test to the streets. Everybody wants freedom — even the protesters. Ask any activist at the Antifa demonstration whether they are for slavery and of course they say no, we are fighting for freedom.
So stop the man about to throw the firebomb, Chas says, and ask one question before he heaves it. How do you define freedom? If he cannot tell you, does he really know what he is doing?
The First Time the Word Was Ever Written Down
Now let's go to the record, because that is what we do on this show.
Chas takes us to ancient Sumer and a king named Urukagina, who came to power, removed the taxes, and restored freedom to the people. That phrase is, as far as the written record shows, the first recorded use of the word freedom in human history. He shows us the cuneiform symbol on screen.
Look hard at the context of that first appearance. Individual liberty versus central control. Just like today.
Four and a half thousand years have passed. We are still using the word, still fighting over the same axis, and still with no more precision than the scribe who pressed that mark into wet clay.
Why Social Science Never Developed — and What That Costs Us
Here is the measurement that reframes everything.
Physics has climbed steadily for centuries. Biology has climbed almost as steeply — organ transplants, cured disease, DNA profiling. Social science, the study of human action within society, has not climbed at all. Chas puts it flatly: it never developed.
Look at what that costs. We can put people on the moon. We built self-driving cars and Starlink. But in the so-called social sciences we cannot solve even the simplest problem. How do you end poverty? How do you stop war? How do you stop crime?
Nobody knows. And our least developed science is in charge of an increasingly dangerous world.
The Monks at Mission Control: An Analogy for Modern Leadership
This is the image people are going to remember.
Go back to the year 1400. An abbey — stone walls, candlelight, a hundred monks who have devoted their lives to study. They have read Aristotle, Plato, Herodotus. By the standards of their day these are educated, serious, intelligent men. They simply have no physics. Galileo is still 250 years in the future.
Now put those monks in a time machine, drop them into the present, and give them the job of running NASA. Tell them to get the Artemis IV astronauts and their dune buggy to the moon. Hand them the rockets, the astronauts, the whole operation.
They would not know how to turn the systems on. It has nothing to do with intelligence or sincerity — they do not possess the concepts to even begin.
That, Chas argues, is our governing class. Their ignorance of science makes them dangerous — worse than ineffective, even with good intentions. Like the fourteenth-century monks, if they try out some plan, most likely they are going to blow something up.
Superstition Backed by High-Tech Force
When there is no scientific understanding, something always fills the vacuum. Superstition. Tradition. Dogma. Dreams. Hopes.
In 1400 that produced the witch trial — burn her to save the village. Today it produces the arms race: Nation A had better develop these war technologies before Nation B does. Why, it is our responsibility. Same reasoning, better tools. Burn the world to save our way of life.
Chas puts one of those tools on the screen: the microwave pain beam, a directed energy weapon built for crowd control. You shoot the demonstrators, their skin feels like it is on fire, and they run away. It gets filed under "non-lethal solution."
His question is the right one. What would Thomas Jefferson have to say about directed energy weapons used to disperse public assemblies?
Stealing and Slavery: The Four Cases
Here the argument stops being commentary and becomes arithmetic.
There are only two ways property can change hands. Voluntary exchange — I give you a thousand dollars, you give me a computer, and we both walk away holding something we wanted more. Or involuntary exchange — I break into your house and take your computer. I gain, you lose. All stealing is that second kind, and all of it enslaves.
Put the definitions side by side. Stealing is the seizure of another person's property. Slavery is the control of another person's property. They are almost identical — two stages of the same process.
And you do not need chains for it. If a thief steals your automobile, he now enjoys the use of it — which means he now enjoys the hours of your life you spent earning it. You are serving him, involuntarily. Involuntary servitude has an older name.
Then come the four cases.
Mr. A breaks into Mr. B's house and takes a stack of hundred-dollar bills. Stealing. No dispute. Next, Mr. A goes to Mr. C and asks permission first. Still stealing?
Then Mr. A knocks on every door on the block — D, E, F — organizes a neighborhood meeting, and holds a vote. The majority says sure, take B's money, it's fine with us. Then he breaks in and takes it. Would that still be stealing? Has B been enslaved?
Then case four. Mr. A worries that B might come home early, so he hires security guards in impressive black uniforms carrying military-style weapons. They stand in the street while he walks off with the money. They fill out official paperwork itemizing the serial number of each hundred-dollar bill. Mr. A gives the guards a percentage — to protect B from anybody else taking his money, except A.
If the thieves wear uniforms, is it still stealing?
Chas does not answer for us. He asks whether any of those circumstances changed the underlying fact — and then asks the question the whole presentation was built to reach. Isn't this the very system we live under?
The Enslaved Mind: Why the Most Efficient Control Needs No Chains
Chas plays an excerpt from a speech by Malcolm X — the passage about the house servant who lived up near the master, ate what the master ate, and ran to put out the fire when the master's house was burning.
His point is not about that era. It is about the mechanism.
That man was enslaved and did not realize it, or did not mind. He may have believed the whole institution was normal and proper. When you think slavery is good, Chas says, your thoughts and ideas and emotions are the thing that has been captured. Not with a whip — through manipulation. The master is doing your thinking for you.
Get everyone in the community, including the enslaved, to believe this is simply the natural way of things — that these poor unfortunates have to be looked after because they cannot look after themselves — and you need no watchtowers, no manhunts, no prison bars, no bounty hunters. They stay put on their own.
I have said for years that the programming is the product. This is the same machine in different vocabulary. The dealers do not need locks when the consumers defend the supply.
Why Opposing Tyranny Has Never Once Produced Freedom
Now the hardest section — and take it the way Chas intends it, as a correction, not a eulogy.
People have longed for freedom, protested for it, killed for it, died for it. The sincerity has never been the problem. Freedom still never seems to get attained.
The reason is a premise every generation inherited without examining: that freedom is the absence of tyranny. Remove the tyrant, and what is left over will be freedom. Quoting J. Snelson, Chas says that strategy has been one hundred percent wrong.
Castro threw out Batista. Lenin threw out the Tsar. What followed was not freedom — it was Stalin, then Mao in China, then the Ayatollah in Iran. Removing a tyrant creates a vacancy, and the vacancy always gets filled.
Because politics is only a two-step program. First, a person or small group imagines how they want the world to be. Second, they force everyone at gunpoint into that plan — with laws, police, armies, prison camps, and executions if necessary.
Science works the opposite way: observe, build a model, test it, throw out what does not work. Politics never reaches step four, which is precisely why it makes no progress.
Underneath all of it sits a contradiction. The only legitimate function of government is to protect property — but seizure is the one action a bureaucracy is structurally built to perform. Seizing people's property in order to protect it is not a policy dispute, it is a logical impossibility. Which is why, Chas argues, no civilization in history has ever survived.
What We Build Instead: A Definition You Can Measure
Freedom can never be a derivative of negative action. It can only be a derivative of positive action. It is not the removal of something bad — it is the building of something good.
So what do we build? Chas gives us a definition, credited to Andrew Galambos: freedom is the societal condition that exists when every individual has full control over his own property.
Full. He writes the number on the screen — one hundred percent. Not most of the time. Not most of your property. No exceptions, no compromise. Under that standard you may act however you want so long as your actions affect only your own property. The moment they involve someone else's property, the exchange has to be voluntary.
A fourth grader could follow it. That is exactly what makes it inconvenient to people who profit from confusion.
And here is where the hope lives, because Chas does not leave us in the ruins. This is the modern world. We have artificial intelligence. We land rocket boosters on their tails. In 2026 the tools exist to define freedom precisely, measure it, and build toward it. The last time humanity chose knowledge over being lied to by ideological fanatics, we got the Enlightenment by 1700 and the Industrial Revolution after it.
A hundred years from now, he says, people will look back and call this the generation that finally chose science over dogma, being practical over being lied to, freedom over slavery.
That is not a prophecy. That is an assignment — and We the People are the ones holding it. Not a party. Not an agency. Not a council of unelected experts. Us, in our own neighborhoods, with our own vocabulary, building the positive thing instead of forever fighting the negative one.
Key Takeaways
- There are more people in slavery today than at any point in human history, and our missing definitions are why we cannot see it.
- Neither freedom nor crime has ever been scientifically defined in politics — we govern by mood, not by standard.
- The first written use of the word freedom, under the Sumerian king Urukagina, was already about individual liberty versus central control.
- Physics and biology have advanced enormously in 4,500 years; social science never developed, and it is the one running the world.
- Stealing is the seizure of property and slavery is the control of it — two stages of one process, and uniforms do not change the math.
- The most efficient slavery is the kind the captive defends; capture the mind and you need no watchtowers.
- Freedom is never the derivative of a negative action. Removing a tyrant only creates a vacancy. Freedom has to be built.
Frequently Asked Questions
If a majority vote doesn't make taking someone's property legitimate, is he saying voting is theft?
He is making a narrower and sharper point: a vote changes who approves of an act, not what the act is. In case three, the whole block votes to let Mr. A take Mr. B's money, and the money still leaves Mr. B's house without his consent. The honest question is whether the vote transformed the act or simply provided cover for it.
Isn't "one hundred percent control over your own property" just a polite way of saying no government?
Chas states plainly that the only legitimate function of government is to protect property. His objection is structural — funding the protection of property by seizing property is a contradiction you cannot build a lasting civilization on. That contradiction deserves an answer from anyone defending the current arrangement.
Why spend so much time on the word "crime"? Isn't that obvious?
It isn't. Drinking a beer was a crime in 1920 and legal in 1934, and the beer never changed — only the statute did. If a crime is whatever the current government declares it to be this year, the word describes a mood rather than a measurable standard. That is the meter problem all over again.
Does this mean we should stop fighting the corruption we already see?
No. It means the fight alone was never going to finish the job. Four and a half thousand years of removing tyrants is the largest experiment in human history and the results are in. Keep exposing what is wrong — then spend equal energy building the positive structure, locally, where your hands actually reach.
Watch the full episode on Rumble: https://rumble.com/v7fpriu-mel-k-and-chas-holloway-defining-freedom-free-world-theory-revisited-9-19-2.html
For my readers – Yes, we used AI to turn this episode into something readable for you. My team reviews everything first and does their best to sound like me. If it doesn't, that's fair, the robots aren't perfect…yet. If you want the real thing – unscripted, unfiltered, and exactly how I said it – that's what the full episode is for. You can always find it here [https://rumble.com/v7fpriu-mel-k-and-chas-holloway-defining-freedom-free-world-theory-revisited-9-19-2.html]